Ethical Hacking Assignment # 1

Anonymous has the capability to expose any person, persons, organizations, or government around the world, and so far they have not tried to harm innocent civilians, but targeted corruption and taken down several child pornography sites. Anonymous is fighting for the freedom of free speech in a country that has it written in the First Amendment that the Congress will allow the freedom of religion, speech, press, right of people to assemble peacefully, and petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Anonymous gathered a rally for Michael Brown who was a victim of police brutality. They fought against Internet Censorship by exposing the video of Tom Cruise talking positively about the Church of Scientology. There was a struggle to keep taking down the video, and it kept getting posted because Anonymous believed that they had the freedom of speech and this was an "abuse of copyright law." Anonymous is global. Anonymous used hacking for the good of the LBGT community of Uganda in 2012, where they expressed their contempt for the treatment of the LBGT people on the Ugandan prime minister's site when the anti-homosexuality law was placed. They encouraged the North Korean citizens to rebel against the corrupt government. They also made a joke out of ISIS by posting Viagra commercial on their site and took it down. They have power, and they have the capability to successfully make the government their victim, as well as the ISIS, imagine what they could do to vulnerable civilians on the Internet? Their job is to help people realize their rights and rebel against corruption and oppression. George Orwell's book 1984 has predicted today. Big Brother is watching us with wiretapping, keeping call databases, and data mining by the National Security Agency. The poor people are kept poor with constant pointless wars that are just expanding into several countries in the Middle East. People are kept under control as long as they are given distractions such as food, water, pornography, alcohol, and this media that brainwashes us. Anonymous is using technology as power in order to fight against all of this. The Church of Scientology believes that there were aliens and there is a long Star Wars like-story which was formulated by Hubbard. Tom Cruise made a statement in a video that Church of Scientology was helping addicts get off drugs, as well as expressing his love for the Church. This video was posted by Anonymous, and they played several pranks on the Church, such as sending disliked pizza and service of denial attacks. This cult that claimed to be a "Church" was the one that was responsible for deaths, mental disorder, brainwashing, and the rise of crimes. The members of the Church were tortured, humiliated, and many of them committed suicides from depression. In my opinion, Anonymous did not harm or threaten anyone's life, they were trying to make their voice heard and expose the crimes of the people in the Church.

Ethics Assignment #1

    The Sony PlayStation incident started by Hotz posted a copy of the root keys of the PlayStation 3 on his website on January 2, 2011. After the root keys of the console were published, Sony initiated litigation against George Hotz and predecessor PlayStation 3 hacking group known as fail0verflow. Sony in turn has demanded social media sites, including YouTube, to hand over IP addresses of people who visited Geohot's social pages and videos; the latter being the case only for those who "watched the video and 'documents reproducing all records or usernames and IP addresses that have posted or published comments in response to the video. PayPal has granted Sony access to Geohot's PayPal account, and the judge of the case granted Sony permission to view the IP addresses of everyone who visited geohot.com. Because Sony was granted it successfully, the hacker group, Anonymous, was angry by this behavior. Also Hotz had settled the lawsuit out of court in April 2011, on the condition that Hotz would never again resume any hacking work on Sony products. Therefore, Anonymous announced fight with Sony. They said knowledge is Free, and they wanted to fight for Internet freedom of speech. At the end of April 2011, an anonymous hacker broke into the PlayStation Network and stole personal information of some 77 million users. After their action, PSN service completely stop a month. SCE President /SONY vice president publicly apologized.

     I agree with Anonymous fought with Sony using hacking skills. This action fight for that knowledge was free. We spent a lot of money to buy their devices, so we should have right to do anything on these devices. Sony Company was a Japanese company, and they may do not know America hacking culture well. Your device was crack, so it meant your company still did not really well. Sometime, cracking also raise our security knowledge. Sony should not check the IP address that who had geohot.com. They had a vulnerability, they had to solve this problem. Why they blamed other people first? However, anonymous stole personal information of some 77 million users. I think this action was wrong. If they could hack other stuff, it would be better. Anonymous was a big hacking group. This group could include any kind of people. If you was one of that 77 million users, you would feel so nervous. You had no idea who was going to use your information to do something bad. Anonymous’ target should be Sony Company not PSN users whose were not relate to this case. In my opinion, it was not fighting for network freedom, and it just gave criminals a good opportunity to make crime directly. After this attacked, I hope Sony can improve their service security. If they could not do well in that, why users should pay a lot of money to support them. 

Ethics Assignment #1

Anonymous got it's roots from 4chan which is an image board website, but anonymous as we know it today is a collective of like minded people standing up for their beliefs. Anonymous is able to disrupt their targets by Ddos, Hacking, and protest. They have had many famous operations over the years but the operation that caught my eye the most in the documentary was Operation Payback. Julian Assange, a hacker, programmer and Journalist started Wikileaks. Wikileaks was created to expose secret and classified information. Paypal, Visa, MasterCard, and Amazon removed their services from Wikileaks so that it would not receive donations from supporters, Even the Swiss bank froze certain funds and this infuriated Anonymous to its core. Anonymous found out that Visa, MasterCard, and Paypal all still allowed their services to the KKK and other hate groups, and that just fueled the fire even more. Anonymous swiftly moved into action and started Ddos (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on Visa, PayPal, MasterCard. and Swiss Bank Post finance. Soon there after Tunisia blocked Wikileaks and Anonymous ddosed Tunisian sites. As a result of the massive attacks 13 participants of Operation Payback were raided and arrested. In the words of many anons "information wants to be free". The government isn't very transparent with its citizens so it can make people uneasy and uncomfortable; Wikileaks is a repercussion of that isolation. when government atrocities or wrong doing's are brought to light people tend to either get angry or want change and anonymous beliefs lean towards change. At first I was definitely conflicted with the good and bad of this operation. I sat and thought about it for a while and I feel like the anons beliefs and intentions were in the right place. The government needs to more explicit, Wikileaks in my opinion is merely a necessity in modern day society. people have a right to know whats going on. and when anonymous saw that threatened they took action. I believe this operation was for the better good.

Social Engineering Task #1

My mission was to slip my assignment card into someone's book bag or pocket.

I slipped the assignment card into Dr. Blu Ninja's left jacket pocket. I didn't get a chance to see a book bag, so I did what was closest to me: the jacket.

It was fairly easy to execute. I performed it as soon as the social engineering assignment was given to me. I took advantage of the fact that Dr. Blu Ninja was looking at his/her own assignment. I even took the card in and out of his their pocket a total of 3 times.

It could be considered an invasion of someone's private space as I was inserting something into their personal property. In a worst case scenario one can frame someone by inserting stolen goods or illegal drugs.

By learning to take advantage of someone's lack of alertness or focus, one can retrieve documents or electronics containing information.

It was a pretty straight-forward task that involved dropping a card into someone's jacket pocket. I thought *afterwards* about how I had no apprehension in executing the task as I seem to compartmentalize the mission and the ethics of it. It makes we wonder if that compartmentalization applies to people doing illegal things.

Structure for Social Engineering Report

Here is a structure for your social engineering posts:

1.  What was your task?
2.  What did you do? 
3.  How effective was your strategy?
4.  What are the moral stakes?
5.  Now that you have done this, what could you do with the information or skills you obtained?
6.  Reflect on how you felt when you were doing this.

Please don't forget to use hacker identities only within blog posts(including your own identity from which you are posting).

Ethics Assignment (due Feb. 1)

You've watched the documentary "We Are Legion", about Anonymous.  Please select a case referenced in the documentary and analyze it.  You might choose, for instance, the DDoS against Lufthansa in 2001, the response to Hal Turner's radio show, Operation Chanology (Scientology), Operation Titstorm (Australia's government), Operation Payback (Wikileaks/Mastercard/Paypal), Anonymous' involvement in resistance in Tunisia, their response to the Sony PlayStation incident, or something else you saw in the documentary.  You'll probably need to do a little Google research to learn more about the case you have selected.

In your post, briefly summarize the situation, and then stake a claim: were the actions of Anonymous right or wrong?  Explain your reasoning: why or why not?

Make your post no later than 9pm on Monday, February 1.  Between 9pm on Monday and when class begins on Tuesday afternoon, read your classmates' posts, and come to class ready to discuss them.

Welcome (Spring 2016)

Welcome to the course blog for Ethical Hacking, as taught by Jaime Mahoney and Monica Poole, at Bunker Hill Community College in spring 2016!  This blog will document some of the work of the course.  There will be posts written by students analyzing issues in moral philosophy as related to hacking, a running chronicle of a social engineering game played by students in the course, and other resources.